26th International Association for Management of Technology Conference - IAMOT 2017

Strategic planning and technology management have become part of executive training, but very few opportunities are available to prepare executives for imagining the future. The future lies beyond strategy and Future Thinking shapes the landscape on which enterprises of tomorrow will exist. The future is not predictable; neither is it pre-determined. This opens the possibility of designing a desired future by being able to project ahead one’s thoughts and experience what could be. It is important that the increasingly complex world and fast change in which business is conducted are supported by holistic thinking. The workshop comprises a combination of short presentations, facilitated debate, individual and group work. It introduces several Future Thinking tools to determine a strategic vision. Mind-time travel related to high level future mapping reveals the barriers of the past, drivers of the present and potential of the future. Anticipation of emerging issues and their impact is done by looking at the the impact of technology (emerging and disruptive), behaviour of people (in the marketplace and inside the enterprise) and events that change the world (geopolitical, natural, economic, social, demographic, predictable and unpredictable, avoidable and unavoidable). The edge of disruption between the present and future is determined by looking at the technologies, behaviour and events through a Future Thinking lens. Their impact and probabilities are determined by mapping them on a relevance matrix and their knock-on effects or higher order impacts by doing the Futures Wheel. The relevance matrix is defined by emerging issues, disruptive issues, wild cards and weak signals. The vision is then formulated based on deepening the future through Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) and doing scenario analysis based on the Future Thinking lens and selecting preferred futures. The vision will now inform strategy and policy to be adopted in the present through applying a back-casting approach. This Future Thinking approach differs from traditional strategy planning in the sense that it is not only based on a macro-environment scan of the current situation, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats analysis and visioning from a basis of extrapolating the present, but enables the strategic planner to “visit” the future by imagining it, making selections in the future and then return to the present. It employs modified scenario thinking where the narratives originate from the cross impacts of emergent issues, and metaphoric thinking is used, based on the degree of uncertainty (events) and control (technology and behaviour) that is expected. Participants will take away an understanding of using mind-time travel to do strategic visioning and to generate a future landscape that is shaped by emergent and disruptive forces and to select from multiple futures a preferred future state from where back-casting enables present strategies.